Preamble
This becomes the seventh blog in the series of “Working with Groups”, where in the earlier six blogs, I have explored the impact of western thought on group dynamics, group therapy, and change management teams.
If you like this blog, I would love to hear your views on how I have mapped the historical evolution of theories and practices around group work, process work, and team dynamics in the first six blogs.
Introduction
A Desire for ‘Tandem’ Leadership
Recently at an intense annual event of a national body of group facilitators, coaches, and process workers – an institution that is gearing itself for entering the fourth decade of its existence, two professionals – Q and R, a man and a woman, volunteered to anchor, design, and deliver the largest public offering – known as the Summer Program. Now, the Summer program is considered the crown jewel of this very institution, where a series of introspective, dialogic and expression spaces are created for a large community of men, women, and children across five or six days to promote well-being and personal growth.
Usually, the onus of designing and directing the Summer Program and its large community is seen as terrifying and demanding. Thus, the volunteering of Q and R, to take on this critical event drew almost an instant applause amongst a majority of members present. While the initial applause was still dying out, the two of them – Q & R offered an intriguing structure and design.
Joint Program Directorship (Tandem Leadership) versus the Program Director (The Convention)
Firstly, the two of them decided to go against the historical convention of continuing with the ‘role’ of ‘a / single’ Program Director at the helm, and rather sought to assume co-leadership through the roles of two ‘joint program directors’ – equal in status and hierarchy, with some defined distribution of tasks between them. In group literature, this is defined as tandem leadership.
The reasons cited by them to take on the roles of two JPDs, was that they liked each other, felt safe with each other, and had been participating members in the Leicester Conference in UK. They saw each other as ‘equals’ and good friends, who could design and anchor this program together.
Their decision to bid for the JPD role created interesting ripples, and like some others, I found myself intensely challenging this notion… I also found myself more aggressive and perhaps not very cogent. This blog becomes an attempt to compensate with some cogency and clarity.
Part 1
Splitting of Authority in Groups
Splitting is a common process that all of us are trained on – it is a primitive psychological defense where the group and or the individual copes with complex feelings – and feelings vis-à-vis authority figures by separating the person or the group into all-good and all-bad parts.
In process workspaces, there are two facilitators (as opposed to a single consultant in a GRC), and it becomes critical that the two facilitators work with how the group may be unconsciously splitting them – where one facilitator gets idealized and the group feels nurtured by him or her and often becomes dependent on him or her. The second facilitator gets unconsciously set up as over-critical, or incompetent or inadequate, and receives projections of frustration, anger, and finally gets scapegoated by the group.
Sometimes the group splits into two sub-groups – a process of fragmentation that also results in the sub-group (supporting the idealized leader) fighting the other fragments that end up supporting the ‘bad’ leader… this factionalism gets the group into not working with the task at hand – and culminates into the group feeling frustrated and unable to exercise authority.
Splitting if worked within the group can also lead to interesting insights for participating members and facilitators.
However, tandem leadership structures, where even if the roles of the two leaders are defined and over-crystallized, attract ‘splitting’ … the dyadic leadership would receive many a projection, but unlike facilitation in groups, the program leadership does not have many spaces to explore and work with these processes.
Worse still, the tandem leadership structure at the top, would also draw out projections from the staff of facilitators and unleash insidious politics within the program management.
Part 2
Mirroring and Group Dynamics
In addition to Splitting processes, the ‘mirroring’ in group dynamics is an interesting phenomenon – it is both conscious and unconscious. In group dynamics and especially in therapy settings, mirroring allows for members to serve as ‘mirrors’ to each other.
A large part of the work of the facilitators is to create – ‘The Hall of Mirrors’ – a psychological scaffolding of self-awareness, that allows the members to connect with each other – to understand and empathize with each other, and a sense of ‘We-ness’.
In the meeting, Q and R sought to create a tandem structure because of feeling safe with each other, while feeling unsafe and threatened with larger systems. This psychologically safe dyadic structure has an unintended consequence – all dysfunctional processes within the dyad – such as rivalry or envy or even sexual attraction may get projected on to others…
Tandem leadership may get mirrored across the larger community – a similar dyadic structure that has been built around ‘feeling safe with each other’, may fragment the community – and this process can be extremely dangerous as a process. There is a possibility that tandem leadership would fragment the community into mirrored dyads and triads – that feel safe with each other in the dyad, and project dangers, threats, insecurities, competition and all other shit outside.
The combination of Splitting and Mirroring as two processes is interesting to work with … and often the staff / facilitator sub-systems get embroiled if these sub-systems do not watch out for the risks.
Part 3
How does Traditional Role Taking help?
As opposed to tandem leadership, a single role of the Program Director builds an authority structure that counters ‘splitting’ and allows for a deeper understanding of ‘mirroring’ within the community.
While I can understand the apprehensions around omnipotence of the single leadership role, there is no ambiguity and dilution that a single role allows for. In many ways – self authorization gets best mirrored when we have the traditional single leader at the helm of the system.
Secondly, power dynamics, including unconscious processes, get a better view with a single leader, who received projections and evaluations from all sub-systems within the system. This process deserves dialogue and adequate work in facilitator sub-systems.
Lastly, each time I have taken on the role of a traditional authority figure, it has also taught me humility, dutifulness, and a clearer understanding of the system and its complexities.
Conclusion
The group spaces and process work contexts are a great place to discover and learn about leadership, the self, and role-taking. Since we all work with conscious and unconscious processes that create a sense of togetherness / mirroring, and a possibility of transformative dialogue, such forums are challenging.
As the authority figure, I cannot remain blind to collusive processes of discovering safety and love, while denying the shadows of human processes within the safety of the pod / dyad and projecting it on to the larger system.
I have no idea what structure Q and R would comply to in the coming months – maybe they would stubbornly hold on to the tandem leadership structure (which is also very woke in how it sounds) and execute it in the Summer Program Space. Maybe they would not do so and defer to traditional structures.
This blog only sums up my apprehensions and anxieties with tandem leadership and I could be proven wrong …
Incorrigibly romantic ... 